Large-scale networked systems are commonplace platforms employed in a variety of settings for running applications and maintaining data for business and operational functions. For instance, a data center (e.g., physical cloud computing infrastructure) may provide a variety of services (e.g., web applications, email services, search engine services, etc.) for a plurality of customers simultaneously. These large-scale networked systems typically include a large number of resources distributed throughout the data center, in which each resource resembles a physical machine or a virtual machine running on a physical host. When the data center hosts multiple tenants (e.g., customer programs), these resources are optimally allocated from the same data center to the different tenants.
Customers of the data center often require business applications running in a private enterprise network (e.g., server managed by the customer that is geographically remote from the data center) to interact with the software being run on the resources in the data center. In this instance, a network connection between components of the business application and components of the software running in the data center is established. This network connection typically utilizes network transport protocols, such as transmission control protocol (TCP), to facilitate reliable delivery of packets over the network connection.
This TCP-based network connection, or TCP connection, is responsible for managing end-to-end message transfers across the independently operating private enterprise network and data center. For example, these tools may manage error control, segmentation, flow control, congestion control, and application addressing (e.g., port numbers). In operation, problematic network behavior, such as network congestion, and lost packets can be detected and ameliorated by these tools by requesting retransmission of lost packets, and changing the rate at which packets are sent to reduce congestion.
When a TCP-based connection is being run on top of another TCP connection, the interplay between these mechanisms employed by the inner TCP connection and the outer TCP connection can result into exaggerated retransmissions and flow throttling that in turn causes significant drop in performance of the overall connection. As such, employing emerging technologies to disable one or more of the tools associated with the layer(s) of TCP-based communication would enhance the throughput and performance of an established network connection while still ensuring reliable packet delivery and congestion control.